'Home again, Rowsley! Bring down your eyebrows, and let me hear you're glad I 've come.'
'What made you expect you would find me here?'
'Anything-cats on the tiles at night. You can't keep a secret from me.
Here's Mr. Weyburn, good enough to be my escort. I 'll get out.'
She alighted, scorning help; Weyburn at her heels. The earl nodded to him politely and not cordially. He was hardly cordial to Lady Charlotte.
That had no effect on her. 'A glorious day for Steignton,' she said.
'Ah, there's the Buridon group of beeches; grander trees than grow at
Buridon. Old timber now. I knew them slim as demoiselles. Where 's the
ash? We had a splendid ash on the west side.'
'Dead and cut down long since,' replied the earl.
'So we go!'
She bent her steps to the spot: a grass-covered heave of the soil.
'Dear old tree!' she said, in a music of elegy: and to Weyburn: 'Looks like a stump of an arm lopped off a shoulder in bandages. Nature does it so. All the tenants doing well, Rowsley?'
'About the same amount of trouble with them.'